My solution to request No. 3 :I installed Nitrogen to handle the wallpapers/backgrounds in my Mint-9 Fluxbox.Nitrogen is easier to use than Feh, for this and even easier to configure, in the start-up script.Nitrogen is the default background manager in #!Openbox, and is in the repros already.

Kendall, the Mint Fluxbox Dev did an awesome job in making the Mint-Fluxbox release, I have no doubt that the next LMD-Fluxbox will be just as grand. Keep up the good work.

Public betas create support nightmares and also create a flood of useless bug reports with too little information. For a dev team of this size, it's better to keep the bug testing to people that know how to do it and know how to report bugs properly (not saying that you can't, of course). Ubuntu has a much larger dev team but also hundreds of open/incomplete bug reports.

randomizer wrote:Public betas create support nightmares and also create a flood of useless bug reports with too little information. For a dev team of this size, it's better to keep the bug testing to people that know how to do it and know how to report bugs properly (not saying that you can't, of course). Ubuntu has a much larger dev team but also hundreds of open/incomplete bug reports.

Quite true, but how many distros that provide public betas actually take any notice of the testing results that they amass from them?

In a community distro an illusion of involvement is sometimes better than a certainty of non-involvement .

Not only that but just occasionally your uniformed tester may well come up with something that your 'professional' has missed. But if you work from my second statement you won't read the gems that come with the dross anyway, so that argument holds very little sway I guess.

There is another slightly less cynical way of looking at this though. Sure if you just release a beta and say "What do you think?" You are going to get all sorts of nonsense back - "I don't like the wallpaper" , "When I installed the 'sherbert' kernel and switched to the 'Debian Deeply Dangerous' repos my Atari games console stopped working" etc. etc. But if you set up a public test arena the way Clem has the private one on the Community site where (to an outsider at least - remember I can't access it) he says - "This is what needs testing" "Does it work, yes or no?" Vote. Then the whole thing just becomes a numbers game. If your professional testers say "Yes" this item works 90% of the time and you then switch to your public site and the public says "No" this item only works 10% of the time then maybe it needs looking at again (or maybe you just ignore it - the choice is up to Clem/Kendall etc.).

Remember when you finally release the OS it is not going to be released into the hands of professional testers, just Joe Public, so maybe you cause yourself less grief in the long run by listening to his concerns earlier in the process rather than when it is too late?

viking777 wrote:But if you set up a public test arena the way Clem has the private one on the Community site where (to an outsider at least - remember I can't access it) he says - "This is what needs testing" "Does it work, yes or no?" Vote. Then the whole thing just becomes a numbers game.

I'd imagine that the testers have to maintain a fairly "clean" system when running those set tests, and you can't guarantee that when you open up a public beta everyone will follow the methodology properly.

There are valid points on both sides of the argument, and in the end it comes down to Clem to make the call. At this point he prefers private betas and has made no indication that he is considering a public beta. We can debate the merits of both all day long but it won't change much

I much prefer to keep things private until most of the feature set is complete and I'm down to working on implementation and usability bugs. Releasing before the feature set is complete is a nightmare and there's not much that can be gained as a result of public testing at that particular point.

paolone wrote:^yes, I remember, but now the LMDE XFCE is out and my curiosity grows...

Considering that the XFCE-version was released just a few days ago I'm guessing that we're looking at this scenario (more or less):

Kendall have to spin a new ISO based on that releaseThis ISO - I suppose it will be a RC will go up for testing for a bit of timeThere might/might not be a need for changes/adjustmentsMaybe a new ISO is needed..Possibly some more testing...

How much time will this take? A week? A Month? Who can tell for sure?I kind of like the statement "It will be finished when it will be finished" (or is it "released when it's finished"?), and I'm not sure there's any better way to express it when it comes to development than that...

- I'd say that patience is something we all might need a bit more of, and that there's gotta be more interesting things to spend one's time on than to be sitting in front of the computer waiting for a new release - like a child waiting for the sound of Santa climbing down the chimney.

Why not use put the wait to good use? There so much to do like:

Flirting with your girl/boyGoing out there and flirt with a girl/boy with intentions of making him/her "your" girl/boyTaking a walk on the beach or in the forest depending on where you livePat a dog (not a police dog - that would be stupid)Read/listen to a good bookAsk the old lady upstairs/next door if she need help with something

And before we know it, one day when we turn our computers back on again and browse to the Linux Mint Blog you'll find that the wait wasn't that bad...

And that's when Kendall gets to do all those nice things - at least until the demand for a new spin start kicking him in the butt

I have the Xfce .iso file to work with. The rejected Fluxbox .iso on the community site was essentially more of a mock-up than anything, just a means of testing to make sure everything was on the right track. I didn't want to base on the RC anyway as there were a lot of issues therein. Since the majority of said issues have been resolved in the stable releases I will be basing on one of them. At the immediate moment it appears that the obvious choice is to use the Xfce edition, however there is the possibility of there being quite a bit of Xfce configuration that's a little more baked in than I would care for it to be so basing off the Gnome edition may very well end up being the superior choice.

Something I should make note of: Fluxbox default configuration takes forever. It's hours and hours of very tedious work and even with tons of experience configuring it in the past, the workload never seems to go away. Getting the default app selection just right is always an issue as certain apps seem to work better with different versions of Fluxbox. The startup processes are another issue as there maybe a dozen or so and the exact order of every app can make a difference (I'm still trying to figure out why this is, and I believe it's something in the window manager itself). Then there's the "do I write this into the session or do I put it in /etc/skel" issue, themes that often need quite a bit of customizing (I think I'm going to have to do a sub-theme of the Mint-X icons just to make sure that people can actually see the network manager in the system tray). Setting up Fluxbox for a single system is relatively painless if you know what you're doing. Setting up Fluxbox to be optimal in as many use cases as possible presents uncountable headaches.

Fortunately at this point I believe I have most of the default configuration done. I'm going to make some adjustments to the menu application to take advantage of an idea I had that should offer yet another speed increase and more standards-compliant sub-menus (I contemplated rewriting it in Ruby to take advantage of it's built-ins that make stuff like this WAY easier to write and implement, but that means having Ruby installed by default). I have the next two days off from my day job and plan on spending at least one of them working hard on the Fluxbox edition pretty much all day. I do have many other things that require my attention as well and they generally do get priority as they pay the rent (tomorrow's project involves getting a MongoDB cluster to fuel a Glassfish Java webapp... should be fun), but I should have another .iso file uploaded to the community site within the next 10 days or so.

Fluxbox is at the very bottom of the priority list. Its been a Year since the last release. They dont even care about it. They cant even get out the KDE version. Clem has too much to do with the Main and not enough Quality help with the less popular versions. If Fluxbox is your thing I would suggest AntiX.